Anna Nicole Smith

Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press

Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy centerfold model, actress and
television personality, gained even more public attention with her
legal fight over the estate of her husband, J. Howard Marshall II, an
octogenarian multimillionaire who died in 1995, 13 months after the
marriage. She went on to star in a reality show about her life that
was savaged by critics and became a spokeswoman for the TrimSpa diet
plan.

If her fame seemed hard to separate from notoriety, Ms. Smith
did not appear to care, reveling in attention, in outfits that often
went beyond revealing. She made a more somber appearance before the
United States Supreme Court, when it heard arguments over an arcane
point of law posed by the fight over Mr. Marshall's estate (the Court
ruled in her favor on a procedural question) and after her son,
Daniel, died in September 2006 while visiting Ms. Smith and her
newborn daughter, Dannielynn, in the Bahamas.

Ms. Smith was found dead
in a Florida hotel on Feb. 8, 2007, setting off a blaze of news
coverage. Her death was later ruled an accident, a result of a
combination of sleeping pills and a number of other medications. Even
after her exhaustively covered burial in the Bahamas, a paternity
fight for her daughter played out in the courts and the media. A DNA
test indicated that Larry Birkhead, a photographer and former
boyfriend of Ms. Smith, fathered Dannielynn. (By DEBORAH LIEDERMAN, April 11, 2007)